The online marketing sphere is ever evolving and one of the most strived for things for any business. It’s all well and good marketing to the masses, but how many of them hold true purchase intention? This is where the power of retargeting comes in. Remarketing (as referred to by Google) enables businesses to strategically advertise to users who have previously shown an interest or interacted with you online. Sounds good right?

But what actually is it?

Strictly put, retargeting allows you to display online banner advertisements to users who have previously interacted with your site. Users may have visited your site, clicked around, maybe even attempted to add to basket, or signup to a service, but didn’t proceed to the next stage. Setting up a retargeting campaign means you can strategically choose to display certain ads to these people. Wouldn’t it be comforting knowing your advertising spend is going towards already interested customers?

Only around 2% of users make a point of purchasing on their first visit to an ecommerce site, but what happens to the other 98%? Well, in all honesty, some of them may be gone for good. But with remarketing, you can transform a good portion of these ex-visitors, into your customers.

What can retargeting do for you?

In an ideal universe, customers would follow a very linear path to purchase, but we all know that isn’t exactly the case, for the most part anyway. This means that many potential customers slip through the net and go on all sorts of tangents, not completing the journey and attributing to the typical sales funnel. Being able to recapture lost customers can help your business achieve more sales and a higher ROI%.

How exactly does it work?

The first step to creating a remarketing campaign is to input a piece of java script code onto your site. This code is generated from within Google Adwords, sometimes referred to as a ‘pixel’. It’s important to note that this piece of code is invisible, and won’t affect the performance of your site! Once inputted onto your site, each visitor can then be tracked around the web, even when they are not physically on your site at that moment in time. This means that every time an ex-visitor opens up their browser, the cookie will notify Google Adwords to start displaying your ads to this user. You can read our blog post on successfully using Google Adwords.

Again, this is great and all, but what if a user clicks onto your site by mistake? This is where the beauty and true effectiveness of retargeting campaigns come in.

The beauty of retargeting

Within Google Adwords, the depth of potential variables you can choose to truly customise your retargeting campaign is phenomenal.

You can further break down specific advertisements based on how the user interacted with your site.

For example, you can set a base campaign advertisement, which will target all visitors of your site. But you can separately target users who visited your site, added a product to their basket, but didn’t proceed to checkout, with a dedicated advertisement banner. Equally, you can target users who didn’t add to the basket, or even users who placed an order!

Within a remarketing campaign, you can have several individual ads, with different messages / call to actions, based on the interactions each user had with your site!

Important things to remember!

Optimising your online advertising to achieve the most efficient results possible, can be a tricky one, and don’t get us wrong – retargeting isn’t the be all and end all if it’s not effectively communicated. Retargeting allows us to reach the right audience, but this needs to be matched with the right advertisements, in the right places.

Each banner advertisement should be suitable for the user you are advertising to, based on their interaction with your site. Standard banner advertisement rules of thumb also apply, ensuring it is the right size, suitable text, and a desired call to action. You also want to make sure you use a high level of branding here, as you know, the user has already knows your business and has interacted with you.

You can also chose to narrow down your advertisements to display on certain websites of your choice, or even related pages surrounding your chosen topic.

Here at Star Digital, we are passionate about exploring the marketing strategies to increase traffic and conversion rates. So If you’re looking at setting up a retargeting campaign for your business, or wish to improve an existing one, please feel free to get in touch with our friendly Digital Marketing Team on 01604 696 385, or alternatively you can email us on: info@star-digital.co.uk

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